


Needs

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 15:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12171378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: Once the dust settles and things come back to as much normal as they are going to be for the next six years, Bellamy starts missing simple, human things.





	Needs

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in MONTHS, and I really missed it, so I thought I'd do what I do best, and write myself some instant gratification porn to get things going. Predictably, I failed to make the porn part happen.

Once the dust settles and things come back to as much normal as they are going to be for the next six years, Bellamy starts missing simple, human things.

This shouldn’t surprise him, he tells himself as he toils in the greenhouse after another sleepless night. Your body would burn itself from inside out if you tried to be in crisis mode for days and weeks on end. This is self-preservation, really, even if he wasn’t exactly sure if and why he had any left. Even back when his sister was taken and his mother was floated, he settled in his routine after some weeks, pain numbing slowly, then morphing into mundane boredom. The world, Bellamy knows, doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper. Instead, it keeps going and going, until tragedy, grief, guilt and elation all give way to how fucking annoying this blister on your foot is.

So here he is: blood on his hands and fear on his heart, but above all, absolutely exhausted, because noises of the Ark keep jostling him awake each night. It hasn’t even been a full year since he left space, but he might as well have lived on the ground for twenty years, given how acutely he misses the sounds of wind and rain, and other distractions of nature soothing his racing mind night after night.

He can’t let himself get used to the Ark again. If he does, it will be like he never left.

Instead of giving in to the familiar-unfamiliar hum of the machines, he tries to fill the silence with people, but that only works for so many hours. At the end of their artificially measured day, Monty and Harper want to have some time for themselves.

So maybe he ends up coming to Raven’s workshop one morning, and asking to be allowed to take a nap somewhere in the corner. And maybe she takes one look at him, all red-eyed and heavy-limbed, and makes him take her own cot, that she’d dragged here because the ground got her used to sleeping where she works.

Maybe, guilty and frightened as he is, Bellamy is now a person who needs to be surrounded by living things to be able to fall asleep.

***

That Raven would start joining him during his naps was really just the matter of time.

As soon as they’re both under a blanket, she clings to him like a greedy thing, as if this simple cover was all she needed to let herself unravel. The ease with which she does it tells Bellamy that there must be layers and layers of needs and questions underneath, and that this physical need of human warmth is covering something deeper and more vulnerable.

He sleeps better on the days she joins him in his slumber, and he knows from the start that this will only be as innocent as they let it. It feels strange to be chaste on the Ark, like he is trying too hard for the sake of something that doesn’t really matter. There is so much coldness and metal here in space that denying yourself sex seems as silly as rationing water when you know you have plenty. Still, the first few times Bellamy tries to conceal his arousal out of sheer habit of self-denial, only to realize that Raven is doing the same damned thing; tensing up slightly under his warmth, and pressing her legs together as she scoots to get closer.

“It’s okay,” he tells her clumsily one day, when they’re spooning and pretending that he isn’t hot and hard against her back, or that she isn’t rocking against him just a fraction of an inch. “If you want… I don’t… It’s okay. Raven? Whatever you want is okay.”

She takes him up on his offer with enthusiasm bordering on aggression, and before she can ask him a slew of difficult questions, he takes a deep breath, and simply gives in.

Her body is different than he remembers. It’s more scarred and it’s stronger, and it moves with unfamiliar determination, like she is proving a point different from the one she was hellbent on during their first night together. He tries soothing her with gestures, and when that doesn’t work, he shares his thoughts in a hushed voice, like he was giving her a guarded secret. It’s okay. No matter what you’ve been through, sometimes you need simple things. You need closeness and you need pleasure; human things that make you human. Even if they do this, he won’t take it to mean that she forgives him for how he left her behind.

He misses the point, of course, but that’s to be expected. It’s what happens when you spend so much time alone with your thoughts that you start believing in your own goddamned wisdom.

***

They start sleeping together at night, too, because Raven sleeps better when she isn’t alone, and that’s excuse enough for Bellamy to justify gobbling up the comfort as well. The thing with humans is, if you give them a little bit of a good thing, they start wanting more, building whole pyramids of needs in their heads. Food and shelter. Safety. Those, he understands; the rest gets a bit muddled up at the top.

What it boils down to is: he wakes up one morning with Raven snoring softly with her head on his shoulder, her hand resting flat on his chest like she is keeping him in place. It does nothing to fix the fear or the guilt; nothing to help him get used, yet again, to this cursed tin can floating in space; nothing to ease the doubts that still plague him in odd moments here and there. It simply makes him happy – not for the first time in weeks, but in some significant way. 

Maybe, he realizes, he doesn’t have to justify why he’s allowed to love her. Maybe he can just let it be.


End file.
